Dr. David Eagleman

It's just an alternative perceptual reality.

It means that the way I picture them is not visually.

I mean, there's sort of a very general, but for me, it's more motoric imagery and, you know, and audio imagery.

Like I'm imagining talking to them and being with them and being close to them and probably some olfactory imagery, meaning how they smell and the whole thing.

Like I have a very rich...

of what it is to be with my kids, but it's a pretty terrible visual picture.

Now, here's the interesting part.

So we've done lots of studies about what this translates to in terms of your capacities in the world.

Nothing.

Why does it translate to nothing?

It's because you can...

accomplish tasks in a hundred different ways.

And so some people are doing this very visually.

Other people are doing it where they're like picturing it with their motor systems.

Others are doing it, you know, as I mentioned with sound or smell or whatever, or others are doing it just purely conceptually, just thinking through how the steps would go.

But there's nothing, there's nothing obvious other than this thing I mentioned about visual artists often being aphantasic.

Otherwise you can kind of accomplish anything.

It's actually after millennia of people debating this.

This is the cool part.

So, okay.